In this essay I will relate my self-portrait called "Always a Woman" to Nietzsche's philosophy of the poles of "Apollonian and Dionysian”, the philosophical dichotomy between free will and primal nature. In relation to Nietzsche, Wikipedia describes Apollonian and Dionysian as: "Apollo (Apollonian): the dream state or the wish to create order, principium individuationis (principle of individuation), plastic (visual) arts, beauty, clarity, stint to formed boundaries, individuality, celebration of appearance/illusion, human beings as artists (or media of art's manifestation), self-control, perfection, exhaustion of possibilities, creation.

Dionysus (Dionysian): chaos, intoxication, celebration of nature, instinctual, intuitive, pertaining to the sensation of pleasure or pain, individuality dissolved and hence destroyed, wholeness of existence, orgiastic passion, dissolution of all boundaries, excess, human being(s) as the work and glorification of art, destruction." (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian)

The painting is an expression of being a woman at the core of all else. I spend my days in a routine doing the things that I need to. When you live your life as a single mom thousands of miles away from your family, your child’s father and any network of relief your reality changes. Even though I love having my son every day for 90% of the year and would prefer it be 100% and my life is as I want it to be, it is guided by a lot of common sense, rationality, and restraint.

On the other hand underneath it all, the single mother, the grad student, the artist, and the business owner is still a woman, with Dionysian impulses. Even though 90% of the time it's restrained, it's still there and occasionally comes out. When we lived near my sons’ father, he visited him every other weekend, and I was free to be less restrained. I was free to go out with friends, party, skydive, stay out late, wake up late, date, and be completely free. Now, I get...

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...The Apollonian and Dionysian man complete each other in the sense that these two
terms create our society. The Apollonian man was given its name from Apollo, the sun-
god. He represents light, clarity, and form. The Dionysian man was given its name from
the Greek god Dionysus. As the wine-god, he represents drunkenness and ecstasy. The
Dionysian was the primal aspect of reality, as well as raw nature, life and death, pleasure
and pain, desire, passion, sex, and aggression. It is the source of primal instincts. "The
Dionysian with its primal pleasure-experienced even in pain- is the common womb of
music and tragic myth...the Apolline is the realm of dreams and ideal forms."("The Birth of
Tragedy" Nietzsche, 1871) The Apollonian is the humanized aspect of reality, civilization,
harmony, and balance. It follows order, form, status, peace, moderation, permanence,
symbolism, language, and reason. In modern psychological terms it is the Ego and
Superego. The complexities of the Dionysian person verses the Apollonian person will be
explored using Robert Johnson's Ecstasy.
The Dionysian name emphazing the irrational element of frenzy was found in the
rites of Dionysus. This book explores the nature of ecstasy through the myth of Dionysus.
In ancient Greece,...

...Introduction
Our presentation is about Friedrich Nietzsche who was one of the most important and influential modern thinkers of nineteenth century for his notions of inexistentialism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism; but before talking about him, I would like to tell you a brief introduction of postmodernism and how this philosopher took these concepts to explain his ideologies.
One of the main characteristics of postmodern thinking is that the world is seen as much more complex and an uncertain place. Reality is not determined and all truth within a postmodern context is related to one's viewpoint or stance. The world is a representation or, in other words, a fiction created from a specific point of view, and not a final truth.
Postmodernism puts everything into question and radically interrogates philosophies, strategies and world views. As we can see, there are plenty of definitions of the postmodern, but we can say that it is an attempt to find new and more truthful versions of the world.
His life
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, the Prussian Province of Saxony in 1884.
His father died when he was five years old; hence, he spent his childhood with his mother, sister and two maiden aunts.
At the age of fourteen, he was awarded a scholarship to enter the Preparatory school, Schulpforta, with the intent of training for the clergy. He excelled in religious studies and German literature. At that time, he also began to...

...orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction” (Nietzsche, First Essay para. 10). Slave morality is something that the inferior came up with to comfort themselves against their superiors. Those that are inferior use slave morality to cope with the fact that they are too weak to defend themselves against those who hold more power than them. Slaves do not like the fact that the wealthy have power and social status. Therefore, slave moralists view those who have authority as being evil and themselves (the commoners) as being good.
Nietzsche clearly states this in the example he uses with the birds and lambs. “– There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’,” (Nietzsche, First Essay para 13). This paragraph is a perfect example of slave morality. The birds of prey are strong and take advantage of the lambs as they see fit. The lambs are weak and are not able to physically defend themselves against...

...commandments can be found along with other maxims in our rationality. However, Nietzsche ascribed to neither of these views. Born in 1844, Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin and philosophers such as Schopenhauer. His moral theory mirrored more that of Hume's in sticking to the tenants of naturalism than it resembled deontological theories such as Kant's. The 18th century philosopher David Hume argued that morality is built on natural sympathy for others. John claims that, like Hume, Nietzsche was a naturalist. However, Ken remains uncertain about the validity of this claim. As far as he was taught, especially in graduate school, Nietzsche was a moral skeptic denying there were moral facts at all.
Brian Leiter defends the idea that Nietzsche was a naturalist. Like Hume, he thought that none of our beliefs are rationally justified. So, why believe in morality—or causation for that matter---if neither has rational foundation? While Hume and Nietzsche both try to speak to this problem, their accounts differ in their approaches. For Hume, we have a natural disposition for sympathy that leads us to accept our moral convictions. Nietzsche, however, has a psychological theory of morality that undermines our moral beliefs entirely. As John puts it, Nietzsche's story of morality explains why we have these beliefs without explaining whether or not they are true. At this point, Ken...

...Essay: ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad,’” which is part of the work On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche outlines the two types of morality--aristocratic and slave--and describes the eventual overtaking of aristocratic morality by slave morality through the “slaves revolt.” Nietzsche claims that master morality came first, with its defining characteristics being the morality of the masters, nobles, and warriors who saw themselves and their actions as good, thus causing those characteristics associated with them to be viewed as good and the opposite of these to be considered bad. Slave morality, however, is derived from noble morality and is identified with the priests, plebeians, and slaves, who are weak, poor, and impotent, and therefore resent the strength and wealth of the masters. With this said, they declare the masters as evil and call themselves good. Although this logic seems to be valid, there is not such a clear divide between the masters and the slaves. If slave morality is based on resentment towards the masters and now that the world has succumbed to slave morality, then who are the masters we resent? This contradiction boils down to the fact that Nietzsche is oversimplifying the classes in society. If one is not a master, then it is not necessarily true that he is a slave, and if one is not a slave, it is not necessarily true that he is a master. It appears that Nietzsche is forgetting to take into...

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“He wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it”:
Truth, Language, and Deception
in Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”
In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, Friedrich Nietzsche emphasizes the idea that what humankind may see as truth is really “a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished” (455). Truth, according to Nietzsche, is really just a manmade concept that has completely omitted anything beyond it. He argues that every word is automatically assigned a concept in which people learn to perceive as the truth, but in his eyes no word has true meaning. People use language in order to generate these ideas or concepts of objects for people to perceive as actuality, but language is only an arbitrary designation made up of metaphors, symbols, and metonymies. He writes, “We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments” (453). Every given object, hidden behind a concept, has its own individual characteristics, but man-kind insists on grouping these objects with known ideas. Nietzsche is not necessarily saying that he wants the human race to work harder when perceiving these truths, but rather that he wants people to be more like the “intuitive man” (460) in the sense of not living life bound to these concepts, but looking beyond...

...Sexually Charged Paintings: What Truly Meets the Eye?
(1) The gaze that Mel Ramos’ nude wears [Figure 1] stares deep into the observer’s libido. While the figure’s exceedingly open sexuality, completed with a sandy tan and voluptuousness, may discomfit some viewers, others may find it titillating as it more explicitly invites the observer to take sexual advantage of the figure’s horizontal position and spread legs. The nude in Touché Boucher is not dressed in subtle flesh tones like Boucher’s reclining figure [Figure 2] from the Rococo, but she conserves the intentions of the usage of the reclining position even in the form of Pop Art. These timeless objectives, according to Leppert and Ferrara, constitute shocking the audience before them, carnally interesting the drifting male spectator and expressing a stylistic art movement that consumes its day. Because what the audience considered shocking and men considered beautiful had changed from the eighteenth-century to the 1970s, Ramos needed to make alterations to Boucher’s Reclining Nude in order to aptly sway its new spectators. This, though, was only a small part of Ramos’ motive for the alterations he made. Mel Ramos exaggerates selected characteristics from Reclining Nude to mock the objectification of the female nude in the reclining position, and I believe the significant extent to which he blatantly exposes the misrepresentation of women in art needs to be detected.
(2) The nude in Mel Ramos’ Touché Boucher is...

... Nietzsche says, in effect, that between Plato, Augustine, and the Buddhist there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference.” What features does he see them as having in common? Why does he not share these points of view?
Nietzsche viewed our values in life in a different way than most philosophers. He had a different perspective in the meanings behind “good” and “bad.” Most philosophers defined “good” as the weak and ill ones, by judgement of ranking and high class to low class. Nietzsche believed that all philosophers lacked the “historical spirit itself.” They all have the common judgement of determining the concept and judgement of “good.” Nietzsche talks about how unegoistic actions were always praised as good even when they weren’t naturally good. Nietzsche believes that the judgement in “good” does not stem from those who goodness is rendered. This means those to who goodness was shown weren’t actually good. He believed that the noble and powerful ones, the ones who were ranked as good because of high-ranking, high-minded, and powerful ranked themselves and their doings of “good. The good good is compared to the word truth because the good is the truth and the truth is the good. The rich, high ranking, strong, beautiful, brave and powerful are associated with the truth and good. As for the poor, ugly, common and low ranking, they are associated with cowardice and lying. Nietzsche...